Bookreporter.com - THE SACRED BOOK OF THE WEREWOLF by Victor Pelevin

THE SACRED BOOK OF THE WEREWOLF
Victor Pelevin
Viking Adult
Fiction
ISBN: 9780670019885

Victor Pelevin discards the basic novelists’ creed --- to tell truth through lies --- as insufficiently complex for his aims. Instead, he tells lies through other lies, and those lies utter parables, and hidden in those parables lie bare and brunt truths, but only if you’re willing to dig. Like his Russian comic predecessors (such as Gogol and Bulgakov), he is often impossible to pin down, but Pelevin takes this ambiguity to a new level in THE SACRED BOOK OF THE WEREWOLF, a baffling cultural collage in the service of a literary drug trip where philosophy meets erotica and everything in between.

This multi-layered book demands to be discussed after reading to settle the stomach. Perhaps its best achievement is its multiple-voiced, near-contradictory koan-like structure, for much like more traditional Zen Buddhist exercises (and yes, this is one too), it requires some amount of dialogue and contradictory thinking to be understood. That being said, Pelevin may have jumped the shark with this book, as the different facets of the novel’s warped prism never fully come together. It’s up to the reader to decide whether this is a postmodern masterpiece or a mess.

The plot (or what there is of one) centers on the millennia-old werefox A. Huli, who looks like a 15-year-old prostitute but possesses a fox tail that creates full-body hallucinations for her clients, allowing them to achieve erotic nirvana while she sucks their life force to sustain her immortality. She loves to allude to Nabokov (consider her Lolita-esque charade) and reads Stephen Hawking, who she confuses for/compares to Stephen King, when she’s bored during clients’ fantasy sessions. One of her clients, Alexander Sery, is immune to the powers of her tail, a mystery solved by his immediate transformation into a werewolf, after which he proceeds to rape her --- her first real sexual experience, which affects her as much as it does us “tailless monkeys.” So begins a love affair that dabbles in philosophical meandering, a conspiracy involving Russia’s oil industry, and sexual adventures that delve into the mysteries of our perception of the universe. Sounds heady and unmanageable? You’d be right.

Unlike some of Pelevin’s previous work, THE SACRED BOOK OF THE WEREWOLF fails to blend its disparate topics, allusions and ideas into a cohesive whole. This may be a sign of increasing ambition; HOMO ZAPIENS (his most successful import in America, which also involves conspiracy theories and Eastern metaphysics) feels like a complete novel, though its critiques and ideas are smaller in scope. Also, unlike HOMO ZAPIENS, we are rarely rewarded for our diligent patience with Pelevin’s tangents, speculation and flights of fancy --- he teases but fails to deliver. A. Huli’s intellectual meditations only sometimes bear relation to each other; her metaphysical discoveries are stand-alone statements for the most part, which may leave the reader asking “so what?”

Her romance with Alexander is uninspiring in large part due to a general lack of character development. We learn a lot about A. Huli, but it’s hard to say we know her by the end of the novel. She retains the cautious distance of a confessing sex worker, not to mention that of a fox. She admits that werefoxes have no personalities of their own (instead, they simply repeat all ideas they hear and develop new selves every generation or so), but as a foil for our times fails to be convincing. This supernatural Lolita that traipses through the centuries is neither sufficiently developed nor meaningful to make a lasting impact compared to Pelevin’s better metaphors. Alexander is a clear archetype of the values and personality of old Russia (and what’s happening to them), graspable in all the ways she is not. But his concrete solidity becomes almost too simplistic. Such is also the main problem deflating most of the humor in this text: it is usually impenetrably heady or blatantly obvious.

These flaws aside, Pelevin has clearly achieved something special in this work. His critiques of Russia’s current way of life --- as always --- are spot-on. The werewolves mournfully supplicate to the bowels of Russian soil so she may bleed oil to be mined for petrodollars. A. Huli’s discussion of cast-illusions and self-delusions do well to capture the crisis facing a Russia bumbling with capitalism and re-embracing totalitarianism, and it speaks of both the wool over Russians’ eyes and their power to transcend it. And as the last few pages reveal, the entire novel may be a lesson to prepare us for transcendence, so we may understand the meaning of true love. At its best, THE SACRED BOOK OF THE WEREWOLF is a series of stomach-churning revelations, with Pelevin cackling all the way. Or we may all be getting hoodwinked. As deep as one reads, there are messages to be found, but the reader may just as easily find these messages to be nonsense, reinforced by A. Huli’s almost bored tone and the lack of any actual narrative.

Whether THE SACRED BOOK OF THE WEREWOLF is a masterpiece or disaster of post-modern fiction (not to mention witty satire or dead jokes) can only be decided by the reader. It can be appreciated without being enjoyed and can be enjoyed without being appreciated. But if readers are willing to surrender completely to Pelevin’s own web of illusion, they’re in for a heck of a ride and are bound to come out of the trip a little changed forever. And perhaps more importantly for American readers: Pelevin reveals as much about our bewildering society as his own in a voice both alien yet oddly familiar --- his lampoons and more serious barbs may even be read as indictments of a West that has altered Russia forever. After all, there are werewolves everywhere.

--- Reviewed by Max Falkowitz

Click here now to buy this book from Amazon.com.